Guns for self-defence

"An innocent bystander was killed and five others were shot in a shopping mall strip on the 6900 block of Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento today. Sergeant Tim Curran with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department told the Mercury News, two men were in a barber shop when two other men came in and started shooting. Sergeant Curran said the first two men were also armed and returned fire. The gunfight moved into the parking lot, witnesses said. A bullet hit a woman putting her two-year-old into her Chevrolet SUV, killing her"

Great going, guys, so... how did carrying a gun work out for everyone, huh?

Guns... yeah totally worth it...

"A rural Wisconsin man blasted his television set with a shotgun after watching Bristol Palin's Dancing with the Stars routine, saying he was fed up with politics and Palin wasn't a very good dancer, according to US court documents.

Steven Cowan, 67, of the town of Vermont, about 15 miles west of Madison, then pointed the gun at his wife, 66-year-old Janice Cowan, who escaped and called police, authorities said. A SWAT team surrounded the couple's farmhouse, and officers were able to talk Cowan out on Tuesday morning after an all-night standoff.

Cowan had been drinking before he sat down to watch Dancing with the Stars and suffers from bipolar disorder, his wife told officers."

BUT.... uncontrolled gun ownership makes society safter from liberals, minorities, gay people, socialists, Martians, and Hollow Earth people.... Right??
Of course it does.

Lose it and you will use it

"The principal of Roxburgh Park Primary School has described the three children who were found dead with their father in Melbourne's north as bright, popular and friendly.
They were lovely, lovely children,’’ said Iain Garfirth today.Asia, 12, Jarius (also known as Jairus), 10, and Grace, 7 were found dead in their Roxburgh Park home yesterday, along with their father, Rajesh Osborne. All four died of shotgun wounds.

The shooter was apparently the father. Murder-suicide.

The mother saw no warning signs at all.

Guns and a point of disagreement

The Spartans were a bunch of hicks who had one of the most repressive states in history, practiced organised rape as a substitute for marriage, enforced pederasty, and were outnumbered by a slave population they ruled by regular acts of terror and atrocity.

Get another role model.

Recently I argued with a gun rights advocate who suggested Australia dump its gun controls.

Blogger-friends tend to go quiet when I talk about this... and blogger-non-friends retreat into Right-wing talking points about the ramifications of an unarmed populace, which are invariably so much empty air.

Among my retorts was a statistic that Americans are more likely than Australians to be victims of gun violence by a factor of (nearly) ten to one. I calculated that myself based on year 2000 stats.

http://guncontrol.org.au/ updates this calculation.

It's actually eleven to one. Intentional homicides with guns: fifteen to one.

As I've said before: proportionate to population this is the equivalent of three 9/11s - every year - in number of Americans who needn't have died had they had our rates of gun violence.

In an article dated back to November 2000:
"The recently released ABS statistics show a dramatic drop in Australian gun deaths for 1998. These figures are shown below. They exhibit the same tendency to decline which was shown in the 1997 figures. The continued reduction in the number of Australians being killed by guns strongly suggests that the stricter gun laws which have been put into place throughout Australia during the 1990’s have saved many hundred’s of lives. A decade ago, in 1988, just before the stricter gun laws started to operate, 696 people died from gun wounds. Last year, 1998, there were 327 gun deaths."

"But if we have gun control then only the crooks will have guns...!" is the usual refrain.
Sorry but that justification does not work for me. The statistics are testimony to the fact that a heavily armed society suffers greater casualties.

Guns kill people. More guns achieves nothing other than killing more people. Often the wrong people.